Temple Run: Oz Review

Sometimes, you just can’t get enough. Thankfully, Disney and Imangi seem to understand that. The successful development house and the transcendent media powerhouse team up yet again to create another gem in the same vein as Temple Run: Brave. Except this one is on a very, very familiar yellow brick road.

You guessed right. Temple Run: Oz hits us straight in the jaw with sunshine roads, lethal fauna and flying monkeys as the meanie monsters. It continues Disney’s strategy of leveraging major motion releases (in this case, Oz the Great and Powerful) with an extremely popular series of mobile games.

Temple Run: Oz retains its endless runner roots from its previous two iterations; I controlled the runner top-down with the use of swipe gestures that will be familiar to Temple Run aficionados: swiping up invoked jumping up, down a low slide; left and right swipes caused a sharp turn in the respective direction. The gameplay started with a quick, hands-dirty tutorial detailing the above. My suited protagonist came running swiftly out of a cave, and a flock of winged monkeys swooped down in hot pursuit. The basic elements were the same: avoid felled trees, boulders and such by jumping. Elevated obstacles had to be slid under, and I had to turn on a dime when the road ended. In addition to those, there was foliage that slowed me down and collapsing roadways to contend with. Thankfully, I could tilt the device to avoid the hazards and/or collect the gold coins that lined the roadway.

In addition, there were prize packs I could jump to collect. Getting slowed down could lead to getting caught by the monkeys, so faltering was something I dearly wanted to avoid.

I really liked the graphics. I think even more time was put into this one. It’s one of those games that need to be seen to be appreciated. From the brick road, to the bridges, to the — sorry to spoil the game here — hot air balloon, everything looked slick. The animations looked great, and worked with the music and overall gameplay. There was in-app purchasing, and coin collection worked well. I liked the objectives table, but also wished the collision animations had been updated.